1. Someone cares personally and contacts me about how things can
be done

Personally and writes to you both directly and here, if that's OK.

I certainly want to help if I can. I think the dicts are a very
useful resource, and I'm keen to link them in with other projects
for my language in which I am involved, about which we have talked.

Is there anything I can do to help, Jutta? Apart from keeping my
translation updated? I'm rather interested in adding terms to the
dicts, if you think that would be useful, or adding external links
to additional information. I think svaksha would be interested in
adding her very scarce languages to the dicts, once we get her
input problems sorted out. Hajni could well be interested, if she
can find the time, to add Hungarian, wihch would be great. We most
likely have other translators on the list who may have time to
contribute: it would be terrific if they did. :)

I looked on the D-W page for the dicts today, and it didn't have
Hungarian (or Marathi or Sanskrit), but it didn't have Vietnamese
either, so maybe it's not quite up-to-date. So I ask. :)

That is the problem...

The dict pages a created by a program out of the word lists. I used
to run the program, which is still in development locally here, look,
if the result goes fine and then synced the results to my homepage
and debian-women website. That worked fine so far.

But then I got comment that that does not fit to the rest of the site
(the time, when debian-women went into baz archive, which was not
accessible by me (I ran woody and most of my stuff still is on the
woody system right now and there is and was not baz for woody).

Here only one of the comments I got, those in #debian-women have been
quite sharper:

It does make it difficult for anyone else in DW to

change anything since the dicts are _completely_ non-standard
compared to the
rest of the website. Fixing this (since I do consider it a problem)
would

be a good thing, not a bad thing.

I would prefer them to be managed the same way the rest of the
website is
managed. I don't think it's a good idea to have one section of the
website

-- besides the wiki, which is something different completely -- be
untouchable by other contributors. Accessibility, etc.

After some time I was tired of comments like "do not fit" and CSS
being not any longer accessible for the created files as the css
files moved from one place to the other. Seemed those working with
the baz archive and making changes to the file hierarchy layout did
not feel any need to announce changes to the others.

The problem that time was, it was not possible to run the program on
alioth, because it needed things not in woody (and alioth was woody
until end of July 2005). Okay, whith the help of the alioth admins I
got everything running on alioth, so that others (which means those
having access and _not_ those contributing to the dict content
before) can make changes to the dict source files.

After that there was the following situation:

- - A local installation here (on my machine) and me working on the
program and collecting entries for the dicts from time to time.
Entries where send to me by mail or using the web form on
www.witch.westfalen.de.
- - And independent installation on alioth, where the debian-.womenb
website is located.

The dicts are still not in the baz archive and nobody did changes to
the files on alioth after I have announced the installation. Even the
program was not run, so that, if there were changes to the source
files, they would not have resulted in new dicts. On the other hand:
If someone had added a new language or words beginning with letters
not being sorted correctly, the program would have crashed and the
dicts not created.

Here I am testing every new language and make changes to the program
every time, I discover a problem with new words or language. It would
be no problem to sync results as done until march. But that was not
wanted. On the other side I do not have the time, to look, if there
have been made any local changes on alioth and try to merge, if there
have been changes on every time I got new entries.

a) Assumming everythings remains as it is, the following work would
needed to be done.

- - Run the makdictutf8.pl on alioth

- - Remove dict entries from source files there, if there are errors on
build time and rerun

- - The program is in /trunk/src/
- - the dict source files are in /trunk/debian/source/

The files there can be diffed against those on alioth and the files
patches in baz archive, if wanted.
After updating the files, you have to install them on alioth and run
the makedict shell script in bin. It will create a lastrun log and
make an entry in the main log with the time, it was run.

In addition the main configuration file in the source directory has
to be changed, if the directory structure on alioth is changes and
foot and head, if the pages on alioth have changes there (menu eg).

b) As there had been a much easier way to do things, I will just
mention that here:

1. Updates for source files go to me (the dict address, which could
be additional persons)
2. If the page head, foot or css have changes, a notice or a bug
report could be send
3. I test the entries, add new languages and adjust the program and
update the files on alioth directly, if everything is tested and fine.

In this case only collecting entries and send notices about changes
according to 2. would have to be done by others in d-w. But currently
I am not willing to revert to that (as it worked fine until march),
if not a majority of d-w decides to to so. I am not willing to get
ugly comments on the dicts not fitting again. and also I am not
willing to get comments about the dicts looking ugly because someone
moved the css to another name or place or made changes affecting the
dicts while that one making the changes, did not test the changes and
send a notice to all.

D-W community or better those shouting loudest decided to go kind of
way a) and not b). For me on the other side, I do not want, that it
looks like if I just am not caring the dicts any longer. I did not
make the decision.

The problem with a) is on the other side, that again (third time) the
dict program will not run on alioth as I have to move to python for
libs doing the correct alphabetical order and not being available for
perl. This results in installing one or two packages not in Debian
stable. But these libs will make it unnecessary to make program
changes for single word beginnings or new languages.

For sure, there is a not mentioned alternative c): collecting words
and create the pages and links by hand and not by makedictutf8. But
that will result in much more work than everything else. Wo does not
believe that could try to add only one new entry in the Acronym
dictionary, add the translations for the meaning and try to make all
the changes needed to add it (links, creating md5 hashes, updating
the pages, create new dict indexes...

BTW: There are already _two_ new languages, which are still not on
alioth: Vietnamese and Lithauian.

One word about Accessibility: Accessibility means to have access.
Access for everyone. The dict files have been accessible for everyone
all the time. They never stayed hidden on my computer. If not so, how
could someone have looked into the souce files and send files for a
new language which was uplodaed to a public place for review on the
same day - including alle generated files? All the files are
accessible with any browser.
Accessibility does not mean, people may change files on any server
directly without caring about the results. The baz archive beside
that does not mean accessible by "all the contributors", if you
include me and otheres who contributed to the dicts.

Contributors for the dicts are beside people from Debian-Women other
people, too. Many thanks here to _all_ contributors and those
reviewing the pages.